Re: Further changes to Super League : Wed Jun 21, 2017 7:29 am
Personally, I would prefer a 12 team league producing 22 games plus Magic Weekend, a six team play-off system and more breaks for international breaks. As for relegation, I'd need to be satisfied that we won't simply end up with a promoted team picking up the voided contracts of the team that comes down, as happened under the old one-up, one-down. I must be honest and say that I don't have a lot of sympathy for this "we need 27 games a season to be viable" argument. We shouldn't be looking to put more pressure on our players by making them play more games and reducing the quality of the competition - we should be pressuring the clubs to make more from the fixtures that they currently have. A tiny fraction of Super League games sell out, so the effort should be on filling that spare capacity, rather than creating more capacity to be filled by the same people.
Since Super League was introduced, we've increased the number of games, we've got more central funding, the real-terms cost of talent has gone down (by account of a salary cap that doesn't keep pace with inflation) and yet we still have clubs complaining that they need the thick-end of 30 games a year, to cut their academy systems and to scrap their reserve grade teams to remain viable because they are incapable of marketing themselves on both a supporter and corporate level.
No changing of the structure is going to save clubs from problems of their own making.
